"Part of it, of course, was dumb luck," she says, "being in the right place at the right time. But part of it, I think, had to do with my own family background."

Being raised in the shadow of her father, however, didn't help open any doors -- if anything, it was a struggle to get out of his shadow.

In her time, von Neumann Whitman faced many challenges as a woman trying to climb the ranks of intellectual and corporate power -- told by an IBM recruiter that they wouldn't hire an engaged woman; told by the president of Princeton that she couldn't get her PhD there because they didn't have enough ladies' rooms.

But she says there is still a lot of discrimination today, if not outright. "Now, I think, they may say instead 'Well, you're not quite right for the job; you're underqualified; you're overqualified...' That personalizes, in a way that the overt discrimination didn't."